Since
Target is essentially my second home, there is some sense of comfort and
entertainment I get from going there.
When I go without the kids it might as well be a beach vacation to
Tahiti for the amount of peace and tranquility it gives me. If I bring the kids, it isn’t quite so Zen,
but I can usually bribe them with a treasure from the dollar bins and maybe even
some Pizza Hut pizza in order to get through the trip. My friend and I have even used lunch and a
shopping trip at Target as a play date.
We realized quickly how bad our judgment was on that call when our
three- year old sons started racing each other up and down the aisles
pretending they were dragons.
Yesterday
was one of those days where I felt like between waiting for Colin to poop
(which he finally did) and sitting around watching cartoons, we needed to get
out of the house for a bit. Besides, I
needed ground beef, bananas and waffles.
So, off to Target we went.
Mistake number one: I let the kids hit the dollar bin first. Normally I purposely park at the opposite
door from the treasure trough of crap so I can hang it over their heads’ the
whole shopping trip. Maddie got some
Easter egg decorating kit and window clings for her room and Colin got a rubber
football and this obnoxious claw-like thing that looked like what my 4’10
grandma used to get things from shelves higher then five feet.
From
there I wanted to head to the children’s clothing section to do one of my most
favorite things to do at Target…hunt through sale racks. I get a warm fuzzy feeling from those bright
orange tags on their merchandise and my excitement only grows when I move from
the 30% off rack to the 50% off rack all the way to the 70% off rack!!! My sale-rack-buzz was immediately killed when
Colin ran off into the racks of clothes and gave me flashbacks to the
kidnapping of Adam Walsh in the early 80s. (son of John Walsh from America’s
Most Wanted). He is the namesake of
“Code Adam” and was kidnapped from a Sears store in Florida. He was only a few
years older than me as his case left an indelible impression on me for the rest
of my life.
We
scored some deals for Maddie and even some Wonder Woman/Super Girl/Bat Girl
underwear before moving on to the boy’s section. Colin desperately needed pants pj’s that
didn’t make him look like he belonged to the Hillbilly Pit Crew from Cars since
most of his pj’s were Cars themed and two inches too short. We thought we hit the jackpot with a Power
Rangers Samurai shirt on the sale rack until we discovered it was the wrong
size. Colin was soon disengaged from the
hunt for deals that also had his favorite characters and ran off into the toy
section conveniently located right across from the boy’s section, but just out
of my line of site. I decided to give up
my hunt for discounted clothes for him and just grab whatever shirts and pants
I could find in his size. In the midst
of my screaming and yelling at Colin and one full-blown temper tantrum, I found
a Sonic the Hedgehog shirt for him. That
was a major accomplishment until I had to wrestle a $30 set of Cars from him
which ended in temper tantrum number two of our shopping trip.
He was screaming and crying walking behind me
as I made my way to the grocery section of the store. He then fell into lethargy mode where he
claimed he was hungry, thirsty and tired.
I remembered I had a Capri Sun in my purse and despite the fact he had
two glasses of orange juice mixed with Miralax earlier to stimulate bowel
movement, I gave in and threw him in the cart and shoved the straw in his
mouth. It kept him occupied for a whole
1.5 minutes until he picked up that claw thing and began clicking it
incessantly. Maddie tried to help out by
taking it away from him, which sent Colin into a tizzy and then she started
clicking it. I gave it back to Colin
just as we entered the frozen food section and he grabbed each handle of the
freezer doors as we went by. I lost my
temper and grabbed the damn toy away from him and tossed it below the
cart.
I headed for the yogurt section
and could barely focus on the brand I usually get when I heard someone call my
name. Oh crap. It never fails when I am screaming like a
banshee at my kids, I run into someone I know who probably knew I was in the
store 20 minutes before she saw me by the antics going on in the kids’ clothing
section. Luckily it was a friend from
high school who has three kids of her own.
She told me that they had just gotten off a run of illnesses that
wreaked havoc on their entire house and that was the first day they had gotten
out. I’m hoping they were just so happy
to be out of the house they didn’t notice how idiotic we looked and sounded. I’m
also hoping the fact that they seemed to peaceful and serene compared to the
flames shooting out of my kids ears was because they just didn’t have their
energy back. Initially I was a little worried about getting too close to them
for fear we’d get sick until I remembered I had just used Colin’s stuffed
animal to wipe his nose when he sneezed and he had licked the counter at the
gym earlier that day. I think we were
well on our way to our own plague.
I
grabbed the last few things from the aisles before I went to the produce
section. The kids insisted on looking at
the catalog of birthday cakes at the bakery section. I let Colin out of the cart and they
proceeded to rifle through the binders all while managing to unhinge the pages
leaving them all mangled. I tried to put
the pages back in their rightful place in the first book and was working on the
second when Maddie opened the binder rings back up and the pages I had just put
back and then-some came falling out again.
I got her away from the display before any more damage could be done and
made sure Colin didn’t jump over the counter and start putting his finger in
any cake frosting.
I
got the remainder of my produce and headed toward the checkout line. At that point, Colin had opened the little
mesh bag his football came in and ripped the tag off his grabber claw thing
leaving the checkout guy instantly annoyed with me. Meanwhile, Colin was in the empty checkout
line next to us launching a car off the conveyor belt. I warned him three times to knock it off
before his car (the kind you pull back and then it goes forward at Mach 3)
crashed into the bagging area. I finally
grabbed it from him just as the checkout guy held up the stuffed animal Colin
brought with him that he had also put on the conveyor belt. This twentysomething might have gone to get
an emergency vasectomy after he encountered us.
As I
left the store an hour-and-a-half after entering it, $187 poorer, set off the
security alarm and without the syrup on my list. I patted Colin down to make sure he didn’t
lift a Matchbox car and we were on our way.
At that point, I felt it necessary to vent to my Facebook friends. “Longest. Trip. To. Target. Ever.” My mother-in-law saw one of my follow-up
comments that this “fun trip” cost me $187, and she immediately called me to
see if Colin shoplifted, broke something or we were fined in some way. Apparently she doesn’t spend that much on her
typical trip to Target like we do.
I
guess the only thing that could have made this trip worse, besides my
three-year old getting arrested for shoplifting, was if Colin’s Miralax hadn’t
kicked in earlier that day and he would have had to sit in the bathroom for an
extra 45 minutes trying to poop. It’s
all about the silver linings.
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